"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail."
Abraham Maslov

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

The first operating system for Arduino

RunCPM, a CP/M emulator for Arduino Due, can now use Arduino's analog and digital pins thanks to five additional BDOS calls, which virtually makes it the first (and so far the only one) fully fledged, professional operating system for Arduino. You can write brand new, or modify any existing, CP/M software, using any programming language available for CP/M platform, to interface Arduino devices. The only requirement is that it should allow you to call arbitrarily chosen BDOS functions (natively or via inline assembly code), because RunCPM uses newly defined routines (220 - 224), unused by standard CP/M implementations.

RunCPM includes a few sample programs in Assembly, Microsoft Basic, Hi-Tech C, Turbo Pascal and DX-Forth to get you started. I also prepared a short video tutorial showing the Turbo Pascal example in action:

A few tips:

Because analogRead returns values that won't fit in a single byte, when calling function 223 in Turbo Pascal you should use BdosHL instead of Bdos to get the value returned in HL register pair, like this: